Phone Only Shows Up as a USB Mass Storage Device
I’ve suffered many a headaches trying to get the USB driver installed, overriding Windows 7’s default USB Mass Storage Device driver.
The trick is to uninstall the USB Mass Storage driver and force Win 7 to choose an alternative setting. The “Android Phone” category should show up and you’ll have to update the driver — pointing to a custom INF file that contains the markup for the G2.
The entire file is below. Sure, you might not need all of these listings, but if you’ve pulled out hair over this issue, copy the whole damn thing! Make sure to point the driver update to that INF file; it’ll call the device My HTC, as that’s the tag associated with all of the items in the INF file.
I can now upload my Android apps to my beloved phone! All is right with the world!
The INF File can be found at this location. Make sure to right click the link and choose “save-as”; otherwise, you’ll have to copy and paste it into a plaintext word processor like Notepad (Win) or TextEdit (Mac) and save the file with the extension .inf.
Phone Shows as an Android Phone with No Driver
If your phone actually gets recognized as an Android Phone or a My HTC Device, then the above solution would yield a message like “the driver was found but there was a problem setting up the device.”
To solve this problem, I recommend installing the HTC Sync application that can be found at the HTC Help Center. Install the “HTC Sync for All HTC Android Phones” and the proper drivers and configuration should be done automatically for you.
The only problem with this method is that you need to make sure that you turn off the HTC Sync application, otherwise, it will make the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) daemon go nuts and constantly detect your phone as a new device. For example, with HTC Sync running the terminal (or command prompt) command “adb devices” yields a growing list like:
SH0CLR201031 offline
SH0CLR201031 offline
SH0CLR201031 offline
SH0CLR201031 offline
These two approaches above have worked for me both times I’ve tried setting up my G2 for development on a Windows 7 machine. I had absolutely no trouble setting up the phone on OSX, so that’s an easier option.
I’d love to hear whether or not it helps!